Practice Your Practice!!

I had always heard the old axiom “practice makes perfect.” It sounded good, but then a wise man told me that “perfect practice makes perfect.” If we practice a bad habit or method we will never be as good as we could be. Either way, to become and remain good at what we do we must practice. Whether we are I sales, education, medicine, or any other field we must put to work the fundamentals of our chosen field. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard or overheard someone say “I wish I could ………as well as you can.

I remember thinking that about someone with great skill at the piano. I proved unwilling to put the time in to build a the skill. It seems like we think there should be a magic pill to take. There is! The magic pill is hard work and staying with the task of developing, then with the task of maintaining. Several years ago my manager accompanied me on some sales calls and interviews. At the end of the day, when I had wandered aimlessly from idea to idea, he simply said, “adlibs are for amateurs.” At that moment, I committed to never entering any project without being prepared.

People that commit to practicing the fundamentals tend to win. I heard a member of the 1983 Super Bowl Champion Washington Redskins say that Coach Joe Gibbs was fanatical about execution of the fundamentals. Blocking and tackling drills over and over until the techniques were mastered. We all have practices, repeated often, that lead to high skill levels. As we see teams succeed and others fail there is often only a small difference, just a small margin. Three years ago the Southwestern men’s basketball team had an 18-12 record, losing five games by 1-3 points, while making about 60% of their free throws. A 67% success spread out over those games would have yielded 3-5 more victories. Free throws are just a small fundamental, but a very important one when the game is close. It’s easy to focus on sensational looking dunks or three point shots, but many games are won or lost at the one point line.

In sports, or business, or life in general it all comes down to a famous saying, “Anything worth doing is worth doing well.” In his classic book “Think and Grow Rich” author Napoleon Hill talks about the three tenets of what he called The Law of Compensation. According to Hill we are ultimately compensated based upon the need for the work we do, our ability to perform the work, and the difficulty the employer would have in replacing us. Two of those three tenets are directly affected by our commitment to “practicing our practice.”